Abstract

Depictive predicate constructions are embedded predicative constructions of the types He came back wounded. Came back is the primary predicate of the sentence while wounded is its secondary predicate called predicativum in Classical Linguistics (e.g. Pinkster 1988), predicative attribute (Paul 1919; Halliday 1967), copredicate (Nichols 1978, Plank 1985), depictive secondary predicate or depictive (Schultze-Berndt & Himmelmann 2004). Depictive predicates fulfil a predicative function semantically while being adverbial adjuncts syntactically. Such predicates can refer to the subject of a syntactic construction as above, to an object or to nominals with other syntactic functions, i.e. its controller, e.g. He drank his tea cold, where cold describes the physical state of the entity tea which is the direct object of the main predicate.

Depictive predicates should be distinguished from: 1) manner adverbials that modify the manner in which the verbal action is fulfilled, thus, they are controlled by the main predicate; 2) complements of the main predicate; 3) main predicates in subordinate clauses: the depictive is dependent on the main predicate and shares its modal characteristics, e.g. the scope of negation; 4) complex modal or phase predicates: unlike in the case of complex predicates, in a depictive predicate construction, the two predicates are assigned to the shared argument independently from one another and allow a transformation into a paratactic construction with the conjunction and. Prosody can play a decisive role here if a morphological distinction is missing.

The state of affairs expressed by the depictive holds WITHIN the time frame of the eventuality expressed by the main predicate. Thus, depictives should be distinguished from resultative secondary predicates that express consequences of the action of the main predicate and, consequently, they do not belong to the time frame of the main predicate.

In this lecture, we will describe formal and semantic types of depictive and resultative secondary predicates in Turkic languages summarizing the results of a recent research on these categories in different branches of Turkic (Schroeder 2004, Memtimin & Nevskaya 2012; Nevskaya 2008, 2010, In print; Nevskaya & Tazhibaeva 2012 ).